Pearl Harbor Survivors Recall the Attack, the Aftermath and the Impact

By Nora FirestoneA condensed version of this article first appeared in The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2008.

Author's note

In 2008 I had the special privilege of interviewing several local
Pearl Harbor survivors for an article. I met the eight gentlemen,
then in their 80s, for lunch following their monthly meeting of the
Tidewater, Virginia, chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors group.

I had no idea what to expect. Would any of the men even want to talk about the trauma and devastation they faced on the morning of December 7, 1941, and during the days, months, and even years that followed? What questions could I, someone 40-plus years their junior, possibly ask that would both honor and respect their personal experiences and also teach my readers? Well, as it turned out, the men were extremely forthcoming in sharing their experiences and feelings. My biggest challenge became whittling down two hours of profound story sharing to about 1,000 words for print--a task even I couldn't accomplish without the help of fabulous editors. In honor of these men and all of America's veterans, the following is an expanded version of the article before its final trim for print:

Pearl Harbor, early morning December 7, 1941

John Delia returned to the ship around midnight. The 20-year-old
Navy seaman might have downed a drink too many on Honolulu's Hotel
Street, but he'd surely wrangled a good time. He hit the boat house
bunk--figured he'd sleep in on Sunday morning.
Hours later, not far off-shore from Ford Island where Delia slept, Frank
Chebetar broke out provisions for the day's menu aboard the USS
Phelps.
His Navy destroyer nested among five other ships in well-manned Pearl
Harbor. The seaman, a.k.a. "Jack of the Dust," figured the only thing he
might defend before going on liberty that day would be the hot
bread--from shipmates like signalman E. Frank Maloney.
Bill Muehleib had just turned 19. The Army Air Corps mechanic had been
stationed inland, at Wheeler Field, in the mountains of the beautiful
Hawaiian island. But he'd recently taken up duty at Hickam Field, where
he'd attended technical school until two weeks earlier, when the school
closed for temporary reassignment as a ground defense battalion.
A 200-plus student body had been divided into gunnery groups, dispersed
to vital installations around the airfield's perimeter, and armed with
.50-caliber machine guns.
Relieved from his 24-hour split shift at 0600 hours, Muehleib sought
respite in his six-man tent, overlooking peaceful Pearl Harbor.
"About five minutes to eight, all hell broke loose," Delia recalled one
recent, blue-sky Virginia afternoon. "I heard bombs and torpedoes and
everything blowing up!" he said. "And machine gun fire! I had to get up
and see what was going on.
"We seen these airplanes dropping bombs. To the left of me was the Oklahoma; to the right of me was the California.
"Somebody yelled, 'Take cover, the Japs are attacking!'" Delia said. "We
told him, 'Bull!' We could see it, but we couldn't believe it!
"Until I seen a plane bank. And I seen a red ball underneath the wing."
The 87-year-old Norfolk man dropped his gaze. "And I knew that it was
not one of ours."
"We could see the pasting that Pearl Harbor was taking," Muehleib, now
86, recalled, as if not a week had passed. "We could see aircraft. You
could see the bomb as it left the aircraft. You could tell where it was
going to hit before it actually hit."
Amid the strafing, Muehleib's battalion defended Hickam.
The Japanese fired 7.7 mm rounds and 20 mm canons in an effort to thwart
arrival of American bombers and eliminate air and ground opposition.
"To hear the 'Poomf! Poomf!' of that canon, along with the 'Whoosh,
whoosh, whoosh' of the machine gun fire, you just hoped the fella' had a
bad aim!" Muehleib said.
Eight B-17s still landed there; four landed elsewhere. America lost a
total of 188 aircraft that morning, Muehleib said.
Smoke from burning oil darkened the sky, he recalled. Amid the chaos and
intense fire, "people were shooting at anything that moved" above.
"Everybody was so touchy." If you left your foxhole later that night,
"you had to be very careful, or somebody'd start shooting at you," he
said. "'Cause we heard the Japs were dropping paratroopers!"
America had been sucked into World War II. Two consecutive air and sea
attacks by the Japanese that morning changed the lives of those at Pearl
Harbor and changed history for the world.

"It was a surprise," Muehleib said. "It was as if you were taking part in a movie that was actually going on somewhere else, but you were a vital part of it. And you got scared to death, feeling hey, somebody's trying to kill us!" Delia described running for his yard salvage derrick, the Mary Ann. "We were gonna get 'er underway, and fight fire and whatever had to be done," he said. "I peered out from the starboard hatch. I see this Japanese plane come down. It was about 20 feet off the water. He dropped a torpedo. It looked like it was coming directly at me. "I just froze there," watched it hit the California, he said. "I grabbed a bottle, I think it was nerve medicine, took a good drink to calm me down." The only one aboard, Delia left the Mary Ann for a launch boat headed to rescue survivors of the battered ships. Three trips between the harbor and the mess hall's makeshift clinic, 50 men at a time, saved a lot of lives that day, he said. Those who didn't make it live on in Delia's memory--in piles along the wall. "It could have been you instead of him," Delia had realized. "That shakes you up." "We were the first base hit," recalled Dave Davenport, who'd been stationed at Naval Air Station, Kaneohe Bay. "After the first group of fighters left, they called us down to the hanger to fight fire and salvage whatever we could. "I went into the burning flames and picked up a .30-caliber machine gun and ammunition," he said. A second group of Jap fighters approached. Davenport's group took up arms behind stacks of concrete powder. "The pilots were so close to us, we could see them grinning as they went by in the cockpit," he said.

After the attack

By 10 a.m. it was over. For 11 days and nights, Delia ran food and supplies to ships and salvaged wreckage. Divers unbuckled Japs from sunken planes and floated the bodies to the surface for dispensary. One pilot had been overlooked, underwater for 10 days, now faceless for the hungry crabs, Delia recalled. Under his flying suit, he'd worn civilian clothes and stashed $864 in American money.

"Just incase he survived a crash or parachuted out, he was able to remove his uniform and mingle among the natives and nobody would be the wiser," Delia said. "Those Japanese thought of everything." The island and harbor were home to 84,078 uniformed U.S. Military personnel on December 7, 1941, according to statistics from the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, a national nonprofit whose Tidewater chapter meets monthly in Virginia Beach. As several of the 32 members shared their stories over lunch, they noted a special significance in Pearl Harbor Day 2008 falling on a Sunday--again. There'd likely be no sleeping in. Lewis West, a Navy seaman, had come under fire aboard the USS Pennsylvania, the flagship of the fleet. Now 89, the Norfolk man recalled the split-second decision that enabled him to think clearly and direct his shipmates to defense: "I decided that I was going to survive," he said simply. About 165 U.S. water craft--from battleships and destroyers to yard tugs and repair barges--had been at the harbor or within three miles of Oahu. Eighteen were lost, sunk or damaged, including nine battleships, three cruisers and three destroyers. West considers the sum "a disastrous blessing. "If we had been at sea we would not have had enough escorts to pick up survivors, and we would have lost every one of those ships" to deep water, he explained. The men often reflect on the attack and its 2,335 U.S. Military casualties. "You learned to be sensitive to what's going on around you," said Muehleib, a Virginia Beach resident. "It's just something you carry with you. "But the most amazing thing was how you felt when you ran across close buddies of yours that you didn't know what'd happened to them. "You had a friendship and a kinship, a feeling of camaraderie that was overwhelming. "Sixty-seven years later, you're still meeting because you shared a common experience at a very young age." As PHSA members, the men participate in veterans' events and memorials, locally and nationally, and speak voluntarily at Hampton Roads schools and civic organizations upon request. Chebetar, chapter president; Delia; and Bill Temple, Virginia and District of Columbia chairman (former Army Air Corps), spoke last year to about 100 seventh-graders at Independence Middle School. They shared their individual stories and memorabilia and answered questions. "I wanted students to get as close as they could to the experience of being there," said Beverly Weddle, American History teacher. "I wanted them to better understand the concept of living history," to make them alert for historical moments in their own lives, and "to understand that everyone's experiences are valuable." "We just want to educate them," let them hear it from the people who were there, Delia said. The men also recommend the 1970 film "Tora! Tora! Tora!" When they cast their eyes in your direction, make it a point to connect. These men have much to say but won't be here forever. America had been warned, by career military personnel, of the nation's vulnerability in light of European civil upheaval, Temple said. But and "isolationist" mindset reigned in America, evoking underwhelming support for defense. "Nobody listened," Temple said. "And nobody's listening now." Temple, 89, warned that play-by-play media coverage in modern-day wartime "is not fair to the soldiers that are fighting the front. "I know things that have happened today, that on my desk, would have been marked 'Top Secret,'" the Virginia Beach resident said. "I believe in freedom of the press," but "they should have a little restraint." "Once you find yourself in war, regardless of how it started, the only way you survive is to win," Maloney, of Chesapeake, said. "The most important thing" is that "the people at home back the military." The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America struck a terrible chord within hearts of Pearl Harbor survivors, Chebetar added. The 87-year-old Virginia Beach resident urged: "This motto I hope that your generation can carry for us, as we are just a handful left: Remember Pearl Harbor and Keep America Alert."